Given the recent dramatic growth in wireless and cellular communications, more and more businesses and other entities are integrating themselves with mobile device technologies. In addition to standard voice features, modern cellular phones and similar devices provide countless other services, such as internet access, email, short messaging service (SMS) texting, digital cameras, multimedia messaging service (MMS), Bluetooth, gaming, various web-based applications and the like. As a result, telecommunication carriers and network operators have been under increased pressure to provide more and more service offerings to their subscribers. Today's network operator wants to attract new and retain customers, develop profitable new business models, improve returns and launch new services as quickly as possible. In addition, the possible competitive pressures from other entities such as internet-based providers have been a growing area of concern in this field.
Faced with these challenges, most operators expect a drastic increase in their portfolio of content and application offerings, from a handful now, to thousands and possibly even millions in the future. While some of these offerings will be developed and deployed in house, the vast majority of these new applications will likely be sourced from partners, Web applications such as social networking sites and third party service providers. These outsourced services will be deployed and executed outside of the carrier's internal network, thereby creating new challenges in security, integration and management of the environment.
To assist with these challenges, new telecommunication gateways and software applications have emerged, which are typically deployed by the network operator as part of a service development platform (SDP). These gateways usually provide features for managing the ecosystem between the operator, its internal subscriber network and various third party providers. For example, a communication services gateway may help to secure third party access to the operator's core network, provide service level agreement (SLA) enforcement, as well as perform numerous other functions.
These service access gateways have greatly simplified the management and control of accessing the telecom network by various third party service providers. However, there still exists significant room for improvement in the ease of use and access of proprietary telecom networks, as well as providing new features and functionality for users. For example, certain legacy networks are frequently accessed by specific and low level signaling protocols. One such set of protocols is the signaling system 7 (SS7) protocol suite and in particular the intelligent network application part (INAP) used in intelligent network architecture. In order to gain access to functionality in these types of legacy networks, the application developer is generally forced to learn the particular signaling protocol, or to use some other mechanism to overcome the disconnect that exists between web development and low level network signaling protocols. What is needed is a simpler and more direct approach to integrating the network operator functionality with services and features in the web application world.